


Aliquam

by desperationandgin



Category: Blindspot (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-15
Updated: 2016-06-15
Packaged: 2018-07-15 06:44:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7212113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/desperationandgin/pseuds/desperationandgin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane works her way from prisoner, to asset, to ally in ten parts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Aliquam

**Author's Note:**

> Post season 1 finale AU. ADDITIONAL NOTE: I wrote this pre-season 2 as you can see by the date published. The gender is incorrect because the episode revealing the actual twist hadn't aired yet.

**i.  
**

She hates the color orange. There’s too much of it, it’s too bright; it’s a color that should be a reminder of days spent outside enjoying flowers and blue skies and birds singing. But now it’s only imprisonment, the weight of handcuffs, the way his touch scorched when he was gripping her arm in anger instead of tentative love. She deserves it, to drown in a sea of this hue, but she still resents the color when the rest of her life is bleakly gray.

**ii.**

They sit in total silence. He said hello; not overly cheerful, only politely, but she hadn’t returned the salutation. Doctor Borden asked, three times, if she wanted to speak to him, and three times, Jane sat silent, stoic. He doesn’t ask anything again, they merely sit while he writes until it’s time for him to leave. As he does, he turns back, not sure what answer he may receive but opening his mouth anyway.

“Why, Jane? Why won’t you speak to me any more?”

Silence. He leaves, glancing to his left when he does, she sees it just before the door closes.

It’s because she knows Kurt’s watching.

**iii.**

“You have to eat, Jane.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you know what they’ll do if you don’t?”

The look she gives Borden suggests she’d like them to try.

“Why are you doing this to yourself? Is it a form of…self-punishment because you think you deserve to suffer?”

“No.”

“Then tell me, please. Something, anything.”

“I don’t feel hungry.”

He watches her, flips through everything she’s slowly been telling him over the last six months. She’s not refusing to give them information, and even when she wouldn’t speak, he knows as a doctor that her trauma ran deep. While others wanted to step up the questioning, he knew it would break her to the point of no return. “What do you feel, Jane?”

She’s quiet, head hanging, hair long enough to cover her features. “Alone.”

**iv.**

Patterson watches through the glass now, by herself, needing to know right away if Jane says something crucial. At least, that’s what she tells herself. She’s supposed to be angry at her, like everyone else, because of Mayfair, and the lies, but the thing of it is, she _isn’t_. She can’t be. Because she remembers Jane fresh out of the bag, and she remembers the way she looked as people took pictures of her naked and vulnerable and scared, and Patterson can’t hate her. She’s sad, and upset, but she aches for her, too.

When Borden comes out after another session, Patterson intercepts him. “Before you send them in, let me talk to her?”

“You know I can’t…”

“Robert. Please?”

He clears his throat, knowing this is very much against the rules, but what the guards don’t know won’t hurt, and as long as he doesn’t go through the last exit, they won’t come and get her. So, he nods subtly and waits.

Jane only looks up when the steps coming toward her aren’t the sound of heavy police boots, surprised when Patterson is kneeling in front of her, reaching out to put her hands over Jane’s.

“I wanted you to know. It’s me in there. Not anyone else. And you aren’t alone.”

She can’t speak in return, too taken aback by the gesture, but she nods slowly, tears building against her eyelids.

With a small, encouraging smile, Patterson squeezes Jane’s hands, then stands to leave, but before she can, Jane calls out hoarsely.

“I never wanted anyone to get hurt.”

The silence stretches for what feels like hours but is only seconds.

“I know, Jane.”

**v.**

Six months have passed and she only knows because Borden tells her the pumpkin spice is in season, and just for today he’s managed to sneak her in a cup to try.

“He’s requested to see you, Jane.”

It takes her a moment of idly sipping her drink before she realizes _he_ means _Kurt_ , and she looks at Borden with wide eyes, almost frozen in shock. She knows, and he knows, that if Kurt wanted to see her, he wouldn’t be putting in a formal request, and as her brow furrows just a bit, her unasked question is answered.

“He asked me if I thought it would be a good idea.”

“What did you say?”

“I said yes, in light of what he’d like to tell you.”

Jane asks, Borden doesn’t tell, and all she can do is agree to meet with Kurt.

**vi.**

The silence stretches and is so vast, that Jane feels like maybe she can hear his heartbeat. Neither of them want to speak first, but then when they both suck it up, they speak over each other and go quiet again. Clearing his throat, Kurt finally looks up at the woman he hasn’t laid eyes on in months, not face to face.

“Figured out…what happened to you when you were five years old. I thought you deserved to know.”

Jane looks at him, her entire body rigid as she waits to hear what he has to say.

“Your name is Amara.”

“ _What_?”

“You were born in Africa. The name means ‘grace.’ Patterson. Looked it up.”

A name meaning grace; maybe _fallen from_. “I’m Jane.”

He continues, his way of acknowledging that she’ll keep being Jane. “The pieces we’ve put together: you were taken because child trafficking isn’t all that uncommon in that part of the world.”

“This isn’t what I want to know. Tell me what I did, tell me who Shepherd is. Don’t tell me about anything I can’t change or fix or do anything about.”

“There’s nothing you can fix now, Jane. What happened, happened.”

“What else do you want me to do? How long am I going to be down here? If you think I’m guilty of something why haven’t I had a trial, or gone to prison?”

She would be broken there, tossed into a system that doesn’t care about the women it chews up and then spits out without a way to support themselves. He would get a report one day, that Jane tried to defend herself, was put in isolation, he knows they’d come over and over again. She can protect herself, too well; it’d make her a target. Here, there’s no one. Here, she’s safe. But what comes out is the only thought he’ll share.

“You’re an FBI asset.”

**vii.**

Assets, apparently, get perks. Over the past three months she’s been given books, a small tablet with no internet access, but plenty of downloaded movies that get switched out fairly regularly. The orange is gone, and now she gets comfortable yoga-type pants, tank tops, hoodies. One day, during a second viewing of _My Fair Lady_ , she’s interrupted by the sound of doors opening, unscheduled. And then, there’s Kurt, standing and watching her, looking like he has a thousand things to say as she sits up and searches his face for any sign that he still cares about her. All she gets in return is stoicism.

“We need your help. Upstairs.”

So, up she goes, and it isn’t until the elevator door opens that she realizes the people she used to call her team will be there, her stomach knotting so tightly she nearly doubles over. But the looks on their faces aren’t angry or vengeful. They look sad and tired, and Jane wonders why as Zapata even smiles, just a little.

“Do you recognize this man?”

Kurt gestures to a screen and in an instant, a memory comes flooding back while Jane watches, her eyes widening when she realizes she was a little girl who got piggyback rides, giggled, splashed in water and received goodnight kisses while she called the man on the screen _daddy_. She can’t speak for a moment, and the brief blossom of hope in her chest is crushed because she remembers where she is and looks at Kurt. “I think…I mean, I remember…I think he’s my father.”

She knows she’s guessed correctly by the way Reade and Zapata look at each other, and Patterson looks at the ground, leaving it on Kurt to speak.

“That man is Eli Shepherd.”

**viii.**

Jane’s moved out of ‘asset containment’ after that, and back into the residence that was her safe house, complete with a security detail. It’s dusty inside, there’s been no upkeep, and when she opens the fridge she nearly gags, but slowly she makes her way through the things that weren’t seized, which isn’t much because she never had many personal items to begin with. There’s a frozen pizza though, and she figures that should still be good, or at worst give her a stomach ache, so she decides to risk it.

As it cooks, she opens a beer (those are still good, too) and takes a sip, closing her eyes as she thinks about the father that trained her for this, who took her away from her mother. That’s why she held his hand. That’s why she never felt afraid with him, only when he left her alone. He shaped her, made her a tool to be used against the government. His greatest asset, her father, her savior. Her hero. Jane’s quiet contemplation turns to a simmering hate, then rage, until finally she snaps and throws the beer bottle across the room, listening to it shatter in jagged edges as she sinks to the floor in her kitchen. She was used, molded to be something someone else wanted until there was no trace of a little girl with hopes and dreams left. She wonders what Amara would have been. Maybe a doctor, or a teacher. A teacher, Jane thinks. A giver of knowledge.

Instead, she knows nothing, and she can smell the pizza burning, but she doesn’t care.

**ix.**

It’s awkward when he comes over, but Jane lets Kurt into her house, offering him a beer and then sitting on her couch beside him with one of her own. She’s not sure why he’s here; she’s not part of the team, not yet, but she wants to be. Legitimately, this time, and not just because of her tattoos.

“I got you on the fast track through the Academy. Pulled some strings. We all know you’re more than qualified to do the job.”

Until this moment, she’s wondered if he wanted her on the team at all, if he was only saying yes because she was an _asset_.

“You…did that for me?”

He makes eye contact with her, and there are a few seconds where the air seems sucked out of the room before he clears his throat. “Yeah, Jane. You’ve earned it.”

“Have I earned anything else? From you?”

Kurt’s eyes leave hers then and he stands to go, putting his still full bottle on her coffee table. “Not yet.” He turns to face her though, almost reaching out but stopping. “Just don’t let me down.” He goes to her door but before he can go through, Jane calls out to him from the couch.

“You told me once that you didn’t think I was a bad person. Do you still believe that?”

Hand on the door knob, Kurt hesitates. Not because he doesn’t know the answer, but because he knows by voicing it, they’re both acknowledging something else.

“Yeah. I believe it.”

When he leaves, she smiles.

**x.**

She pulled the trigger and ended it.

A raid on a compound, the location of Shepherd finally found after almost two years of fighting her way back onto the team, of earning her accolades every step of the way, proving herself to Kurt and the others that she belonged. And now she’s here, gun still smoking, all of the answers about her life bleeding out in front of her. Kurt’s alive though, rolling away from the body of the only person who could have told her everything. Jane’s frozen, gun still trained on the man dead in front of her, and Reade talks her down as she begins to shake, medics called in, looking after Kurt, checking to be sure the stab wound he insists is only superficial is just that.

“Jane.”

She looks up and meets Kurt’s eyes, her own still blown wide in shock. “I killed him.”

“Jane, look at me.”

“I killed my father.” Her eyes meet his but they’re wild with panic and horror, because how could she? How could she kill the only person who could have told her anything she ever wanted to know?

“You saved my life, Jane.” Kurt’s hand takes hers, puts it on his chest. “Listen to me, Jane.” He keeps saying her name, over and over again, and slowly she calms down, flattens her hand so that her palm is right over his heart.

“He had a knife, but he didn’t get a chance to push it all the way through. You saved me. You saved me, Jane.” His arms envelop her then, in front of God and everyone, he doesn’t care, a hand going to the back of her head as she falls apart against him.

“You saved me.”


End file.
